Rob Isaac

In emulation especially, there’s an almost indescribable joy in seeing something that would have cost millions when you were a child happily booting, with all of the options enabled, on an average everyday computer like it was nothing at all.

2026-10-17 21:17:36 UTC

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I ended a relationship with a middle school girlfriend because her family moved to a town three hours drive (and crucially, a different area code) away. That wasn’t unusual at the time.

2026-10-17 21:04:28 UTC

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This happened to me last month and I had to sit down for a while.

2026-09-20 23:54:36 UTC

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PICO-8, Picotron.

2026-08-12 20:45:28 UTC

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My favourite is the haptic feedback in laptop trackpads. People will get into fistfights about whether or not the pad really moves when it fakes a “click”.

2026-08-12 03:49:18 UTC

OK, I loved the premise and the aesthetic of Blue Prince despite the pun name, but the way it intentionally penalises you for saving is the most user-hostile game design I’ve seen in a fair while and I’m not interested in supporting that. I’d refund it if I could.

2026-08-05 00:59:58 UTC

Stating for the record that I have met Aral Balkan ( @npub1p09…m5vl) in person, and have engaged with him personally and professionally for roughly 13 years. Adopting a lazy and brainless “devil’s advocate” position that maybe his current humanitarian work _could_ be some sort of financial scam is incorrect, unhelpful, and contributes nothing but noise to a serious and unpleasant topic. Please stop it.

2026-07-25 21:27:32 UTC

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If we’d put half the effort into addressing the overuse of layered abstractions and embarrassingly stupid javascript as we did pretending language models are sentient, no one would be queueing up to rent their occupation from the same companies that barfed out the javascript in the first place.

2026-07-25 21:18:59 UTC

I’m pretty bored with this whole notion that just because some people have built ridiculously baroque software development setups that don’t work and mostly produce garbage, that somehow justifies the wholesale adoption of wildly unethical code-writing robots that also don’t work and cause brain damage in people who use them too much.
I did something stupid so now it’s OK for everything to be stupid is certainly an argument. It’s just not a very compelling argument.

2026-07-24 02:14:58 UTC

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I genuinely can’t imagine how it would be less informative than the current rituals, but I worry I’d never get hired again.

2026-06-21 03:26:11 UTC

It is June 2001. Due to a conflicting maze of poorly-defined standards, VLC’s hilariously bad user interface is the only consistently reliable way to play the weird video setup I’m working on.
It is June 2006. Due to a conflicting maze of poorly-defined standards, VLC’s hilariously bad user interface is the only consistently reliable way to play the weird video setup I’m working on.
It is June 2011. Due to a conflicting maze of poorly-defined standards, VLC’s hilariously bad user interface is the only consistently reliable way to play the weird video setup I’m working on.
It is June 2016. Due to a conflicting maze of poorly-defined standards, VLC’s hilariously bad user interface is the only consistently reliable way to play the weird video setup I’m working on.
It is June 2021. Due to a conflicting maze of poorly-defined standards, VLC’s hilariously bad user interface is the only consistently reliable way to play the weird video setup I’m working on.
It is June 2026 …

2026-06-05 07:32:54 UTC

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I’ve seen this before, and no LLMs were involved. It’s addiction.

2026-05-05 20:49:11 UTC

working in technology right now is great, the most PT Barnum motherfuckers you ever saw are all like, we have invented a time machine, and now 78% of all discourse is required by law to include endless hours of strokey-beard waffling about the endless political and social and economic implications of time travel and the deep impacts on our whole society and how we all must take time travel very seriously and shovel all our money into the time machine furnaces or we will be stranded in some terribly unfashionable decade with no snacks or friends and we’re all so busy worrying about that we’ve somehow failed to realise that there is no fucking time machine

2026-04-25 03:19:53 UTC

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if I had a dollar for every “stop taking medication and then write long unsolicited letters explaining things to people who didn’t ask” 😁

2026-03-13 08:10:18 UTC

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but … no, you’re right, I’ve got nothing

2026-03-13 08:06:23 UTC

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I love you man but this seems like a pretty low bar

2026-02-24 09:39:27 UTC

the after dark screensavers were the last time humans agreed on what peak personal computing looked like

2026-01-05 01:03:49 UTC

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If you encounter an unconscious person, make sure that whatever hurt them is no longer a threat before you try to help them. First responders regularly drown, get electrocuted, or suffocate because they didn't check first. It's not selfish: the patient is much more likely to die if you create a second simultaneous emergency. (2/7)

2026-01-05 01:03:38 UTC

Watched the first episode of a new TV show last night. Not naming it because spoilers but you can probably guess if you've seen it. A lot goes wrong in the first episode. Some general first-aid advice: (1/7)

2025-12-19 21:05:21 UTC

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Consider micro instead: this one is LLM-generated.

2025-12-19 05:14:37 UTC

Me: Hmm, havn't seen the cat in a while.
<takes a whole smoked fish out of the fridge>
Bernard: J'ARRIVE MOTHERFUCKER

2025-12-15 03:00:55 UTC

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I’ve met your boss, he’s pretty decent.

2025-08-14 21:33:48 UTC

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Also I am _desperate_ to see your footnote on “cool”.

2025-05-30 12:05:20 UTC

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I just switched from WezTerm to Ghostty, liking it. Some glitches I’ve noticed: no local search (!), insistence on a correct-but-tedious approach to termcap that doesn’t really work in the real world, and some minor compatibility glitches. But it runs like a dream even on some extremely weird embedded linuxes with no drama at all. And _fast_.

2025-03-27 00:41:24 UTC

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This task continuously reads every pixel in every tab in every window to build a machine vision model for "accessibility". The task instantly respawns if you kill it, reduces battery life from 9 hours to less than one hour, and makes the laptop too hot to touch. It can't be turned off.
https://files.cloudisland.nz/media_attachments/files/114/231/564/483/579/075/original/457d0d22eda95ad9.png

2025-03-24 22:49:16 UTC

Today Google bricked my Chromebook by force-installing a hidden extension that trains a machine vision model on the contents of my screen without my consent, making the whole machine too hot to touch, and I am once again begging someone, anyone, to remove Chrome from Google by any means necessary.
https://research.google/blog/screenai-a-visual-language-model-for-ui-and-visually-situated-language-understanding/

2025-03-23 01:54:06 UTC

Careless People is an amazing book about Facebook that the author is legally prohibited from promoting because Facebook don’t want you to read it. You should read it today!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People

2025-01-09 20:20:40 UTC

Stop calling it Meta. It’s not fucking “meta.” Facebook in a rusty white panel van, parked outside a school with a sign that says FREE CANDY, is about the least “meta” thing that exists.

2024-12-21 09:46:27 UTC

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Your downstairs closet now includes free use of GitHub Copilot.

2024-12-17 01:35:18 UTC

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Hey, could you show me the ingredients list? I am _keen_.

2024-12-08 21:23:28 UTC

NZ currently has a culture war about what speed it’s appropriate to use when crushing children with your car outside a school, and this is the sort of shit the alien archaeologists will name us after. Not “the sporting people” or “the sailing people”, but “the child-crushing people”.

2024-11-29 01:49:52 UTC

Your friend wants to buy a car, so they go see some car dealers. First one offers them a 500km/h nuclear-powered car. The second, a 600km/h fusion-powered car. Now they want to talk to you, a mechanic, about which car is better. That's what the endless AI conversations feel like if you work in tech.

2024-11-21 10:37:51 UTC

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That voiceover has … a CADENCE … that emphasises the subject … of the SENTENCE … in a way that is almost IAMBIC tetrameter … but ISN’T, so it’s DISTURBING and UPSETTING

2024-11-09 09:30:51 UTC

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JFC. I gritted my teeth to get past the substack thing and I’m glad I did. I have an intermittent benadryl habit that enrages the doctors who keep me alive, and I saw a lot of myself in that. It’s illegal here, at least as a sleep aid, because it destroys your brain. But that deathlike sleep is such a craving.

2024-10-25 19:09:47 UTC

Please don’t buy any fireworks this year. Just stop. You’re creating an enduring hostility in your neighbourhood that will persist long after you’re done exploding things.

2024-10-11 20:43:29 UTC

Friends, Romans, countrymen: I’m not boosting your cool shit because you’re not putting alt text on your images.

2024-09-25 23:27:37 UTC

tag yourself, I’m METHIONINE
https://files.cloudisland.nz/media_attachments/files/113/200/781/874/396/708/original/071d99b6b4a515ff.jpeg

2024-09-08 01:43:03 UTC

The disconnect is most people see Mozilla’s purpose as providing a browser alternative that isn’t garbage (and in particular, doesn’t cooperate with surveillance capitalism), but the Mozilla organisation thinks it’s purpose is to maximise revenue and “build, commercialize, and open source components and tools that make it easy for developers and users to develop AI agents to solve real-world use cases”, whatever the fuck that means.

2024-09-07 11:20:55 UTC

My cat screaming at a door doesn’t mean “please let me in”. It means “this door should not be closed”, a subtle but important difference that has taken me years to learn.

2024-08-27 00:23:57 UTC

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That must have sucked, but the positions are evil or not-evil, and I think anyone trying for half-evil needs to experience some consequences. Nice work.

2024-08-20 08:48:26 UTC

if you’re in NZ you should go outside and look at the moon because there’s some rare astrological thing happening and it’s amazingly bright
https://files.cloudisland.nz/media_attachments/files/112/993/481/663/994/244/original/caea3caaccf48b0b.jpeg

2024-08-19 01:57:30 UTC

Good afternoon.
https://files.cloudisland.nz/media_attachments/files/112/986/197/950/242/313/original/b175c44b30cc580d.jpeg

2024-08-13 00:50:01 UTC

it’s weird how the “massive ddos attack” is completely invisible outside of Twitter’s internal services and is having absolutely no impact on any other part of the network at all
these must be some next level attackers